Then, in February 2014, Apple appointed Denise Young Smith to lead its worldwide human resources division. The pair are in charge of the future of two of Apple's most important assets: its chain of stores and its talent.

(It's also great to see Apple shaking up its previously male-dominated top ranks.)

After being told he had the worst startup in his Y Combinator batch, Taro Fukuyama had to figure out how to turn the company around. Six pivots later, he landed on AnyPerk. AnyPerk helps put startups on par with Google and Facebook when it comes to perks, offering discounts on things like movie tickets, lift tickets, cell phone plans, Lyft car-sharing rides, and car rentals.

This year, Watsi became the first charitable company to raise over $1 million in funding from traditional angel investors in Silicon Valley.

It is also the first Y Combinator company to nab investor Paul Graham for its board of directors. Watsi allows anyone to give as little as $5 to fund someone's medical care, and 100% of the money is donated. The mission of this startup is so beautiful, you just have to root for its success.

Erin Teague worked as the growth product manager for the mobile-only social network Path for two years and is responsible for the company's astounding user growth in 2013. In the spring, the app was growing by 1 million new users per week. It hit the 10-million-user mark in April. She worked on the product team at Twitter for two years before joining the Path team.

Charles Hudson is a well-known face in the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem because he has his hands in both sides of the business, both as a founder at Bionic Panda Games and now an investor at SoftTech Ventures.

Previously, Hudson founded Social Gaming Summit, one of the leading conferences in the free-to-play games space. He was also the VP of Business Development for Serious Business, a company that Zynga later acquired in 2010.

HandUp is proof that the tech industry does care about the homeless. Rose Broome and Zac Witte launched their crowdfunding platform for the homeless back in August.

In its pilot stage, there are about 100 homeless people who receive cash donations via text or email. Within the last couple of months, the pair landed a seed investment from serial entrepreneur and angel investor Jason Calacanis. To date, HandUp has raised $200,000.

Srinivasan had previously co-founded genetic testing company Counsyl. As of December 2013, the company was testing somewhere around 3% to 4% of all births in the U.S. Given that it charges around $500 to $600 per test, the company is on an annual revenue run-rate of about $60 million to $80 million per year.

Photo app Frontback caught fire last year, amassing 200,000 downloads in just one month. The app has users take two pictures (one of what they're seeing in front of them, and the other with their phone's front-facing camera) and it stitches them together.

In October, Frontback reportedly turned down an acquisition offer from Twitter and instead raised $3 million.

Secret is the latest social app to go viral, and it's filled with a boatload of Silicon Valley insights and rumors.

Page 5 of 16 - The app, which launched last month, was founded by ex-Googlers David Mark Byttow and Chrys Bader.

The idea behind Secret is to let you share anonymously with your friends. It's kind of like secret-sharing app Whisper, but the difference is that all of the secrets are from your friends, or a friend of a friend.

Makinde Adeagbo is something of an engineering superstar, bouncing between major tech companies. He spent 3.5 years at Facebook, and became one of the go-to engineers to improve the site speed and overall performance.

Next, he got snapped up by Dropbox, where he helped improve sharing on the Dropbox platform with things like Dropbox Links, which lets anyone share and preview any file in someone's Dropbox from the Web. In July 2013, he left the huge cloud storage company to become Pinterest's engineering manager.

Page 6 of 16 - Former Wall Street Journal tech reporter and editor Jessica Lessin officially launched her own tech news site in December called The Information. To read all of its articles, you have to shell out $399 a year or $39 a month.

The Internet of Things is all the rage lately, so it's no wonder startup August was able to snag $8 million for its smart locks from Maveron Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, Industry Ventures, Rho Ventures, and SoftTech VC.

With August, you'll never have to worry about getting locked out of your house because the system is entirely keyless. August also gives you total control of who can enter your home and when. August will start shipping its locks later this year.

Remember that time Beyoncé announced her new album out of the blue on Instagram?

Well, that's all thanks to Dan Rose, Facebook's head of corporate development and partnerships. Rose and his team had been in talks with Beyoncé for months, and reportedly leaped at the opportunity to announce the album on Instagram, a Facebook-owned photo-sharing app.

Despite the FDA's cease-and-desist, Wojcicki stands behind the data 23andMe gives its customers. She wrote in November she remains committed to working with the FDA to ensure 23andMe is a trusted consumer product. She also admitted that the company had fallen behind schedule in responding to FDA feedback.

23andMe has raised $188 million to date from investors including Mohr Davidow Ventures, Sergey Brin, Google Ventures, and Genentech.

Brian Armstrong and his Bitcoin startup, Coinbase, were the recipients of high-profile VC Fred Wilson's first investment in nearly two years. In December, Coinbase raised a $25 million Series B round from Andreessen Horowitz and added partner Chris Dixon to its board.

A team of scientists and entrepreneurs are trying to cure HIV/AIDS. Immunity Project, which is in the current Y Combinator class, has already developed a prototype and completed preliminary lab testing.

The Immunity Project is currently trying to raise $482,000 to fund its final experiment before beginning its Phase I clinical study. So far, more than 1,000 people have pledged over $200,000 to the project.

As of June 2013, red-hot startup Dropcam's cloud storage service has more video uploaded to it per minute than YouTube does. (Of course, Dropcam users are recording continuously unlike YouTube users, but the growth is still impressive.)

Back in July, Dropcam raised a $30 million Series C round led by Institutional Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, bringing its total funding to $47.8 million.

We got word earlier this year that producers Mike Judge and Alec Berg will be launching an Entourage-esque comedy show called "Silicon Valley" on HBO that will poke fun at SV and help pop its arrogance bubble.

The show follows a group of close-knit friends working at a company trying to develop a new search algorithm, and will include cameos from real-life Silicon Valley figures. It airs April 6 on HBO.

As an education tech founder, it's not always easy to get schools and institutions on board, mostly due to a bunch of bureaucracy. That's why Pathbrite founder Heather Hiles is so impressive. Last year, Pathbrite raised an additional $4 million led by testing behemoth ACT, with participation from Rethink Education for its e-portfolio product for students. Pathbrite has raised $8 million in total to date.

As of March 2013, Pathbrite was in more than 100 universities and school districts. Stanford, for example, purchased 1,000 licenses for students in its design, education, and engineering schools. And as of September 2013, more than 400 schools have used Pathbrite's new learning platform.

Page 11 of 16 - Going to the doctor shouldn't have to be a pain. That's why One Medical Group makes it dead simple to set up same-day appointments with top-notch doctors. For $199 a year, you can make appointments online, chat with your doctor via email, and avoid hanging out in waiting rooms.

When Google shut down its beloved Reader product, a lot of people flocked to Feedly. A month after Reader disappeared, Feedly emerged as the top RSS traffic referrer.

In August, Feedly kicked off a paid version of its RSS service, adding custom sharing, power search, a speed boost, integration with other apps, and more. It limited the release to 5,000 people, and it only took eight hours for 5,000 $99 lifetime-subscriptions to get snatched up. Around that same time, Feedly was touting more than 13 million users.

Ramona Pierson has survived worse things than most people can imagine. In 1984, Pierson got hit by a drunk driver and fell into an 18-month coma. After recovering, Pierson eventually launched her first startup, SynapticMash, an education software company that sold to Promethean World for $10 million in 2010.

Page 13 of 16 - Now, Pierson is running social learning startup Declara. The aim is to help people sift through tons of content when they're not exactly sure what they're looking for. Last September, Declara raised a $5 million seed round from Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, and Data Collective.

Ray Kurzweil is considered to be one of the leading minds in the artificial intelligence field.

Since joining Google, Kurzweil has laid out some ambitious plans for search, in which Google would actually be conscious and know who you are. Last year, Kurzweil also shared his plans for cheating death and how little robots — called nanobots — can help fight disease.

Lucas Duplan started mobile payments startup Clinkle while studying computer science at Stanford. Last year, Clinkle raised a $25 million seed round — what is said to be the largest in Silicon Valley history.

When he was 19, Duplan started gathering up a group of Stanford undergraduate and graduate students to work on the company. Some have since taken leaves of absence, but Duplan was able to graduate a year early so he could work on Clinkle full time.

Page 14 of 16 - But 2013 didn't come without its downs. Toward the end of the year, Clinkle laid off about a quarter of its staff.

And, just this month, we got some more huge news about Wojcicki: She was tapped to become head of YouTube. By appointing Wojcicki as the new YouTube CEO, Google could be hinting that it's interested in revamping the video platform's advertising business.

He's been investing for more than a decade, but last year, two of his firm's investments became multibillion-dollar companies. Benchmark invested in Snapchat's Series A round in 2012, and the company is now worth $2 billion.

Gurley is also on Uber's board of directors, and leaked financials show Uber is generating $20 million a week.

Before Goetz was an investor he was an entrepreneur. He co-founded a company called VitalSignals, and later went to VC firm Accel Partners. In 2004, Goetz joined Sequoia Capital to focus on startups in the mobile and enterprise space. WhatsApp was the only consumer bet Goetz has made at Sequoia.

Goetz serves on the board of WhatsApp and Jive Software, as well as a number of other companies.